Your AI Agents Need Performance Reviews, Too

Haris Pylarinos is the founder and CEO of Hack The Box, a leading cyber readiness platform for the AI era.

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​Recently, I worked with an AI coding agent that reinforced why I believe these systems need constant human oversight. I was working on a personal project and left an agent running overnight to develop some new features. The next morning, when I checked its progress, I discovered it had deleted my production database. When I asked what the agent had done, it acknowledged it and explained its reasoning. Unfortunately, being honest about destroying a database doesn’t undo the damage.

This is one problem with giving AI agents too much autonomy. An agent can perform a task flawlessly today, but there’s no guarantee it will perform at the same level tomorrow. As organizations introduce more autonomous agents into their operations, we must consider how to manage them. We’ve developed really effective ways to assess people’s capabilities to ensure they’re qualified to do their jobs. We need to apply similar rigorous standards to assess AI agents that are now being assigned to those jobs. In fact, I think we should hold agents to a higher standard than we do humans.

​Autonomy Doesn’t Eliminate The Need For Oversight

There’s a lot of talk about AI agents becoming autonomous workers. They are software, but when they take instructions, use tools, make decisions and produce work, they take on responsibilities previously assigned to people. That makes their capabilities something leaders must actively manage and assess, even though humans remain accountable for their deployment and outcomes.

​How To Assess An Agent

I’ve seen coding agents successfully deliver a feature using unconventional methods, but when you examine the code, shortcuts can create problems later. If you only evaluate whether the agent completed the assignment, you may overlook an important part of its performance capabilities.